


To See The Sunset

by Arvak



Category: Original Work
Genre: Death, Original work - Freeform, Survival, Tornado
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:35:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21564640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arvak/pseuds/Arvak
Summary: There’s one thing he’s learned in his short-lived escapade into the hot danger of fire: you can’t save everyone. And he was the type of person who couldn’t accept that. He’d sooner tear himself apart than accept that his failures - which impact others’ lives, or, rather, their lack of them - are not of his own.





	To See The Sunset

**Author's Note:**

> Another Original Work. To the few who read it: I hope you enjoy!

He was on his way home from work, going down his favorite highway. It was settled into the side of a mountain and to the left was the long span of mountains that stretched all the way across the horizon. Sometimes, heavy clouds settled around the bases of the mountains, shrouding their evergreen trees in thick fog. Usually, he could see the sunset gleaming off of that fog, the most wondrous pinks, teals, violets and oranges would color the sky. Usually, the mountains would be alight with the sweet glow of the sunset, illuminating them until they seemed like fairy-tale wonderings. Today, however, it was dark with a raging storm. He liked the storms just as much as the sunsets. Sunsets were wondrous and pure, but storms were a thunderous force of nature that decidedly humbled him. He watched the dark clouds roll like boiling oil as he drove on. The entire world was a shadow to him, the sun hidden behind the mass of churning black masses like a warning of doom in physical form. He watched the trees turn their leaves to the brustling wind, only adding to the eerie feeling a mighty storm weighing down. 

He smiled to himself and enjoyed it. 

Just a few yards away from the highway road, a massive bolt of lightning struck. The force of it erupting into the ground was comparable to an explosion, not that he’s ever experienced a nearby explosion of any kind - unless a failed firework in an old tire during his childhood counts. Regardless, compared to the bone-vibrating jolt the ground gave, his childhood pick-up truck tire bursting into flames amid a lot of loud obnoxious crackling while he and his best friend panicked and tried to put out the fire before they got caught starting a forest fire was _nothing_. 

He slammed on the breaks when the cars ahead of him swerved in startlement. He would’ve cursed at them if he was that kind of person. Silently, he told himself to hold steady. Just as he was, everyone on the road was now bound to be very twitchy, and for good reason. They regained control and continued on slower than before. 

He followed well behind and pushed his breaks every time someone got too close to his rear. Space was imperative when tensions were high. As a former fire-fighter, he knows how to keep his cool when things go chaotic. Not that he made it very long as a fire-fighter. He had the motivation to be a fire-fighter, and he could handle the stress, but, sadly, he couldn’t handle the failures he knew he was bound to have. 

There’s one thing he’s learned in his short-lived escapade into the hot danger of fire: you can’t save everyone. And he was the type of person who couldn’t accept that. He’d sooner tear himself apart than accept that his failures, which impact others’ lives, or, rather, their lack of them, are not of his own. 

He didn’t think anything of the swirling taking place in the cloud about a mile ahead of him. There was a lot of swirling going on in the clouds above him, anyway. Plus, he’s seen it happen before and nothing ever came of it. But when a few moments passed and he looked back at that cloud, he could feel his heart begin to race. 

That cloud was beginning to look suspiciously like a vortex - a funnel cloud - a forming _tornado_. 

And it was right in front of him. 

The cars in front of him sped up just about in sync with his startling realization, undoubtedly hoping they could race past and escape it before it ever hit the ground. He watched them try to fight around each other to get out of the way, and then watched an SUV run off the road and skid to a rough stop from nothing more than the panic consuming the road. 

He opted to slow down, instead. 

He watched behind him and some of the cars slowed down with him, like-minded people cutting over to the slow lane when the cars behind them sped up, also hoping to race past. They flew by and he tried not to think of them as idiots for putting everyone else in danger just to try to escape before the rest, but he knew what it was like to react recklessly to fear. Meanwhile, the funnel cloud was reaching closer and closer to the ground, getting bigger, faster, meaner. He realized he would not be able to get past it, and he started hitting his breaks. Otherwise, he would end up right under it when it touched down. He’d missed his window of opportunity. 

The cars behind him jerked into the other lane to avoid hitting him and sped past, a final attempt at escape rather than surrendering like he did. 

A light-blue, soft-top Jeep swerved when the tornado finally touched down right beside it and it went off the road, the winds pushing it over onto its side where it tumbled and tumbled until it stilled to a stop, looking like a paper cut-out that someone had taken and crumpled ruthlessly. Windows were shattered, metal was warped, the fabric top was torn to shreds. He couldn’t tell if that was blood on the little bit of glass that still remained of the driver’s-side window or just an overactive imagination acting up to the havoc around him. 

He pulled off to the shoulder of the highway and slowed to a full stop, eyes wide and heart pounding. He pulled his seat belt tight around him and held on as he watched the tornado come closer. He could feel the winds roaring at the side of his Chevy Blazer, such a sturdy machine, but still the winds rocked it back and forth easily. It reminded him of his college days learning about fire’s properties, learning about oscillation, a constant ebb and flow, like a pendulum or an electrical current. In steady oscillation systems, the object in question can stay at a constant rate of repeat. But, an oscillation system of entropy can become, in the purest sense of the word, chaotic. 

A sports car went skidding past him nearly sideways and veered off to the slow lane before it stopped. The driver and passenger - two college kids - dove out and started running for cover in the trees when the tornado arched and came right at their car. The kids were safe in the trees whilst the heavy winds pushed at their car, a window breaking and glass exploding into the roaring winds which would have certainly ripped the two boys into shreds. He felt his heart stop and clench as he thought of it; if the kids had stayed in that car, they would be bloodied and torn up into something less than human. 

He watched as one of the college boys grabbed the other by the shirt and pushed him down as he crouched over him behind the tree. He wondered if they knew how close they had just been to death. 

He blinked, then, as their car, weighting something of thousands of pounds, was turned an entire 180 degrees just by the wind alone. The tires screamed against the asphalt, but to no avail. 

He wasn’t far behind them. He looked in his rearview mirror and saw some cars turning around on the highway, saw some pulling as far off the shoulder as they could. Some people in the stopped cars stayed inside, buckled tight and bracing for impact while others ran for cover like the college kids. 

Farther behind him, there was a head-on collision from one of the cars trying to escape going along the uncongested oncoming road and a car coming around the corner, unaware of the danger that had lied ahead. He winced and wondered if any of the passengers were alive after that. 

_You can’t save everyone._

He watched those two cars that had crashed, and saw that no one was helping them, everyone too preoccupied with their own panic. 

He looked back ahead of him. The tornado was getting closer. 

He made his decision. 

He dived from the car and stumbled. The wind was unreal. The first thing he noticed was the _noise_. He had thought it was loud while he was in the car but to say it was _roaring_ was an understatement. He felt like he was being pushed by a thick, impenetrable force - a wall of wind. It was unlike anything he’s ever experienced before. He ran towards the cars that had collided, hoping to help in some way, but the winds got stronger, louder, and something hit him in the back, sending him to the ground. 

A red car came _flying_ towards him. He let out a short yelp and scrambled to the shoulder of the road, out of the way. He heard skidding, crunching, and then he looked behind him and the red car was now nowhere to be seen. But that became the least of his concerns when he saw just how close the tornado was, now. 

He had always figured the movies overplayed it. He always figured when you got this close to a tornado, you would be pushed away, or maybe off at an angle. But he was definitely fighting a wind that was pulling him _in_ , and _up_. 

He dropped down to his flanks, hands going raw as he tried to push down on the road, fight against the wind, but still he slid across the asphalt towards the tornado. He rolled over, elbows digging into painful concrete while his clothes whipped and tugged around him, and army crawled against the winds towards the ditch on the side of the road. He didn’t look behind him. He couldn’t. He was too scared to look at what would very well be the cause of his death. 

After having faced death more times than he wished, he always found himself wondering why people didn’t just make conscious decisions to get out of the fire on their own. The fire burns at the walls, it makes the ceiling weak. You can’t stay in the house! But now he understands. Fear can be a motivator of irrational actions. 

When he reached the ditch, he saw others there. He slid down with them. It was a father, a mother, and two daughters. His heart ached for them. The kids, mostly, seeing the terror on their faces echoing those of the kids he’d pulled from fires, or lost to them. 

There was a loud noise, like a car being demolished. Then, his entire world became more surreal than ever when there were loud, piercing screams, a blur of something big moving very fast, and he looked over and saw a warped, twisted piece of silver-painted metal piercing the ground, sticking at an angle through the mother’s side. 

_Through her._

She was still breathing. 

She was still _screaming_. 

He let out a horrified wail and ran, unable to face the ugly truth of life… the truth of _death_. Ugly, disgusting, horrifying death. He’s seen death before but the fire had always burned away all of the humanity on them, making them nothing but corpses - objects - warped _things_. But that woman… She was _still alive_ , yet undeniably dead. Nailed to the ground like a collector’s insect. 

He fell to his knees, vomited, then scrambled back up to keep moving. He covered his head as things flew by, he stumbled and slipped as the wind tore at him. It got closer, stronger. His shoes slid across the rough pavement. He lost traction and jerked forward, falling on his hands and knees. He felt the burn of his skin scratching raw on the road as the wind pulled him in even stronger. 

Then everything became a blur, and he couldn’t remember exactly what had happened if he tried. All he felt was disorientment, the feeling of absent ground beneath his feet, his limbs getting pulled this way and that, the roar of the wind, a rise in elevation, and then falling. He never even felt the impact of the ground. 

What could have been seconds, minutes or even hours later, he woke up. There was noise. Sirens in the distance, a helicopter in the sky, a man above him shining a flashlight into his eyes, asking what his name was, if anything hurt, what he could remember. So much noise, and yet… Absent of the roaring wind. Was it over? 

Could it really be over? It was all so… obscure. All he could think of at that moment was the woman, gruesomely skewered with metal, but still alive to scream. And she _screamed_. It felt like she was still screaming now. The wretched noise that crawled through her throat like corpse hands clawing from the ground sounded ever-present in his ears. He wanted it to _stop._

The man above him wrestled with an orange gurney from his back and set it on the sloped ground beside him. The man helped him get onto the gurney and then he was covered in a thick blanket and strapped in. The man was asking him questions while he was being strapped in, but he couldn’t answer. He was stuck in a horrible spiral of the past events. He couldn’t stop them from playing in his head, like he was still stuck in them. The roar of the wind, the feeling of it pushing and pulling him towards death, the college kids who had survived, the mother that hadn’t. 

Oh, god. The mangled metal sticking out of her, right beside her children and husband. Her face of fearful agony after having something large and solid tear through her skin, muscle and bone. The blood that had poured through her shirt to trail gruesomely down the silver metal. Her flailing limbs whilst she was pinned to the ground - hands frantically grabbing the metal, reaching for her family, who fell away. Stuck in her kneeling position while her feet scrambled at the dirt below. Her _screams_ , wet from the blood that filled her throat and mouth. The screams of the dead. 

Giving up on trying to get any answers from him, the man shouted into a walkie-talkie. Then, the ground left his back and they floated through the air towards the helicopter so far above. He looked over at the man who had found him - who had saved him. Feelings of overwhelming relief and gratitude came about, and suddenly all the times he was offered outrageous things in thanks for saving a life make sense, because he was now feeling that urge. How could he express to his stranger how undyingly grateful he was to be rescued? To be _alive_. 

He shook off the emotions and looked below him and marveled at just how far he had fallen. He was far into the woods that spanded along the highway, and over a hundred feet down the hill. From the air, he could see the damage the tornado had caused. There were cars strewn about along the entire span of the highway, ripped apart, people being rushed into the ambulances, others sitting on the hoods of their cars in a daze. 

He couldn’t believe he had been found. 

He couldn’t believe he had survived. 

He looked to the horizon where the dark clouds had parted and stared blissfully at the soft, sweet, golden sunset over the mountains, and he breathed. 


End file.
